I’m actually slightly embarrassed to be giving this one any more oxygen – it’s a non-story on a slow news day and should really be treated as such. For some reason, though, I’ve found myself getting sucked in. So…
To give a bit of background, every so often the city council (or a Birmingham-focussed organisation) will award a contract to a company unfortunate enough to be based somewhere other than Birmingham. In the past couple of years Marketing Birmingham and the MAC have been lambasted for looking further afield for suppliers.
The Library of Birmingham is the latest, having awarded a PR contract to a company in London called Colman Getty after a tendering process which involved several local companies. Unfortunately, the result has been the kind of short-sighted outcry that clamours for protectionism and only makes us look ridiculous, parochial and insecure.
The Birmingham Post have provided the headline most likely to feature in indignant tweets:
Library of Birmingham marketing contract awarded to London firm
Whereas Business Desk WM have been a bit more measured with:
Midlands firms beaten to Library PR contract by London agency
I like how those two seem to imply slightly different things.
On the plus side
Ok, so they might not be from around these parts, and I can’t tell whether the best company won (I haven’t read the proposals and I didn’t see the pitches) but lets see if they have anything to recommend them.
Colman Getty’s clients includes cultural and literary institutions like the Saatchi Gallery, Manchester’s Lowry Centre, the Man Booker Prize, Cheltenham Literary Festival and JK Rowling. So that experience could come in handy when drawing up a “high impact regional, national and international campaign” for the LoB.
Although bids of up to £350,000 were invited, they’ve asked for £292,000 (83% of the total). That seems decent of them, especially as we all know how expensive those London agencies are.
Incidentally, someone mentioned that that’s a lot of money to spend on marketing. Bearing in mind that’s to cover activity over a three-year period for a £189m project that’s meant to give Birmingham some international profile it doesn’t seem all that much to me.
The interesting bit that’s been missed
Colman Getty’s MD says she’s looking forward to working with Birmingham City Council and, more interestingly, “our partners, Writing West Midlands“. So there’s a local link. It’ll be good to find out what role they’ll be playing.
If you only read one thing…
What I usually do when this issue crops up is point towards the guest post that Fullrange’s Lee Kemp wrote for the Birmingham Post a couple of years ago. It’s the best explanation I’ve come across for why reserving regional projects for regional companies is a bad idea. Although I should give a nod to Pete Ashton’s post and the comments below it.
So, while I’m sorry for the likes of Rewired and S&X (who are understood to have pitched for the work – and I’ve only got the BPo and BLWM stories to go from) and others who pitched, it’s surely healthy to bring others into the city.
Tomorrow
I might round-up a load of work that companies in Birmingham have been winning from under the noses of other agencies in other cities. No-one seems to make so much of a fuss over that news.
The real question is why does an (unbuilt, unfinished, unopen) building need major international PR support.
Trying to resist the urge to chip in on this, but I just can’t help myself.
I think this comes down to a point of scale and expertise. Last time this debate broke out about the mac website I felt really conflicted, because whilst Made was busy winning plenty of high-profile arts venue work in other cities around the country, we were incapable of landing the arts-centre on my doorstop, that I’ve been going to since I was eight.
The reason we get to work in other cities is because of experience that we’ve gained thanks initially to a few larger-scale local projects. At a certain level, projects require a degree of expertise and scale. That level of expertise might be scarce at a national level, in fact it’s now common for us to pitch against US firms.
Unfortunately, the inverse is true. A by-product of attaining that scale and expertise, may be that it puts you out of reach of smaller local projects, however enthusiastic you are about them.
Much as I support the anti-protectionist stance laid out by Lee, I do think working with a local company can provide some benefits. I think the key one I forgot last time is the issue of local pride. (I’ve been giving this some thought). I’m quite sensitive to the local twitterati criticising my company’s work for example. The Edinburgh Twitterati, not so much. That helps keep me on my toes for local projects.
So I think it’s for the organisation judging the pitches to weight that in as a factor, against all the other considerations they’ll be judging the pitch on. If it’s a small project, where a high level of demonstrable expertise is not required, then I’d imagine local concerns could factor in fairly high. A larger project where specialist expertise is critical might weight locality much lower on the scale. And that’s as it should be.
Jon – Because it’s being treated as a major international building, I guess. If you’re going to spend £189m on a building you might as well tell people about it.
Chris — I’m not sure that a library (for the people of the city, mostly) should be treated as a major international building, which is my point.
I think the real issue is not that a £300k PR contract has been awarded to an agency outside of Birmingham.
The real issue is that it has been awarded to an agency at all, rather than being handled entirely in-house within the council; over the last year the council has made a whole stack of its PR and Comms staff redundant, and £300k amounts to the annual salaries of 12 of those staff who are now looking for jobs elsewhere – staff who would have been perfectly capable of handling the library’s PR themselves. If they weren’t capable of it, then that’s a performance management issue, not a general staffing issue.
As Jon intimates, big shiny and expensive library as it is, it is only a library. It doesn’t need a PR machine more suited to flogging Coke behind it.
If nothing else, this really hammers home the fact that the pretentiously named ‘Library of Birmingham’ is not a library at all, but a giant PR exercise to tell the world how ‘cultured’ the city is. It’s a travesty and will have exactly the opposite effect. It seems that PR has filled the gap where ideas, vision and politics used to be.
I’m not a huge fan of the Victorians or their architecture, but they built great libraries, town halls, railway stations etc based on, and to reflect their economic success and the dynamism of their cities. These structures had real meaning and purpose, which is why they’ve lasted us so long. Our so-called ‘landmark structures’ are built on nothing – they’re created in the vain hope that they’ll magically transform our cities, or worse, the moronic notion that they’ll transform our VIEW of cities like Birmingham (and magically economic success and social cohesion will follow).
What kind of view does the outside world have of a city that spends hundreds of millions of pounds on a science museum in the middle of nowhere that isn’t big enough to hold most of the exhibits; a new railway station – sorry, ‘Gateway’ – with platforms not long enough for the new high speed rail line, so we have to build another one that does; and now a library that is purely about projecting the ‘right image’.
I love new buildings and great architecture (I studied design and architectural history at uni) and, from that point of view alone, I’m looking forward the new railway station and ‘library’, AND I don’t give a damn about the money; but we seriously need to ask why the hell we are doing all this, else we’ll be back to square one again in a decade or so.
Have to agree with a lot of what Niall said there. There’s been a ‘vision void’ affecting the city for a long while now. There’s a lot of reasons, but a big one is the way things are done here – most things are developed or designed by committee, and this creates a buck-passing, risk-averse approach to doing things. There’s a tendency to look elsewhere at things that work for other places and then do a half-arsed version that fails to achieve the thing it was set out to do – the ‘aim low and miss’ approach. What we need is for people with vision and passion to push things forward, take risks and stop trying to please all of the people all of the time, a pointless and impossible task. Maybe when I’m elected Mayor I’ll be able to give it a go.
If it’s such a ‘landmark building’, why do we need to spend almost £300,000 telling people it’s there?
If we want to boast that we are a “world-class” city we need to open ourselves up to world competition. And we need to compete in the world. Work is promised to no-one, not because of location or any other factor. I agree with Jake, local knowledge and insight is a key advantage to play up in your tender, but it’s not the only criteria by which to choose someone.
Iconic buildings DO alter the external perception of a city – any city. Put the words “Birmingam England” in google images (I just have) and you get a canal, the Bull ring, Selfridges (lots) and the floozy in the jacuzzi. That’s about right isn’t it? Another iconic image will play its way into that cannon. Inward investors find that sort of thing important, sad but true.
We’ll have to wait and see if the New Library (LoB) turns out to be a iconic, landmark building or not. If it isn’t, you won’t be able to make it into one by telling people it is, no matter how much you spend!
It is already looking oversized for the site and there is a danger that it will stand out for the wrong reasons. To be successful it must function – as the current central Library seems to do – for the residents and visitors – or it will become a giant vanity project. And it is being paid for by selling off the site of the old library for development (it all seems to have gone very quiet about what will be going there…). Creating the new Library (people will call it what fits, the Library of Birmingham seems it a bit of a mouthful if you are in Birmingham) is a big gamble that the people of the city will have to live with for years to come – on the back of losing a decent library.
There is a wisdom that it is better to do something amazing and word will spread, rather than spending your resources on telling people something is amazing and then they are disappointed when they arrive. Word of mouth (whether literal or through social media) is still the mot powerful influencer. So lets hope ‘ the powers that be’ know what they are doing with the build and are not trying to cover up by spinning us a line through a PR agency (depending on whether the hype sinks or swims, maybe the local agencies are better off out of it ?)…but as Niall points out, the plans for a new New Street Station shopping experience, that unbelievably do not increase rail capacity, does not inspire any confidence in our ‘leadership’ to make decisions that will positivley affect generations beyond the careers of the politicians who are basking in the glory now. At least the Victorians planned for the future with their infrastructure projects…
Good post Chris but am yet to meet any grown up professional whose opinion is formed by a headline.
Alun – I’m sure more people read the headline than the article, but I was probably reading more into them than necessary – a hangover from my A Level English Lit days.
Helga wrote;
“Inward investors find that sort of thing important, sad but true.”
Shame, I’d rather hoped the new library was about more books, better reading and archive facilities, but I’m afraid you’re right – it’s anything but that. What’s even more unfortunate is that there has been so little said about this shift in the function of libraries over the last decade (where were all the people now complaining about cuts when this was happening?). If libraries are about putting us ‘on the map’, portraying the city as ‘cultured’ and acting as a tool for social policy, then I’m not really sure they’re worth fighting for.
Funny, my last post seems to have disappeared. Are comments on this issue now closed or did I hit a wrong button?
Niall – it got caught by the spam filter for some reason. No idea why, but I’ve rescued and posted it now.
Very thoughtful of you Chris. Thanks very much. I think we’ve probably milked this one now (or at least I have!). Good to have a bit of heated debate. Thanks everybody.